Ishida Baigan, (born Oct. 12, 1685, Tamba Province, Japan—died Oct. 29, 1744, Kyōto) Japanese scholar who originated the moral-education movement called Shingaku (“Heart Learning”), which sought to popularize ethics among the common people.

The son of a farmer, Ishida began studying ethical doctrines in Kyōto as a young man while apprenticed to a merchant house. In 1729 he launched the Shingaku movement with lectures in his home. Confucianism supplied the fundamental ethics, but Ishida also incorporated Daoist, Buddhist, and Shintō elements. Explaining moral education in simple terms, Ishida used many parables in speaking directly to the people. He toured the country lecturing and in 1739 published Tohi mondō (“Question and Answer Between City and Countryside”).

Some 400 disciples carried on the movement after Ishida’s death, and Shingaku grew, partly with government encouragement, until it had 81 schools all over Japan. As the teaching became more dogmatic and stereotyped, however, it declined in popularity, and by the end of the Tokugawa period in 1867 the movement was in a final decline. Ishida’s works include Seika ron (1774), an essay on family government espousing the Confucian view that a man who cannot govern his family cannot govern a nation. His disciples published Ishida sensei goroku (“The Sayings of Professor Ishida”) in 1806.

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religious and ethical movement in Japan founded by Ishida Baigan (ad 1685–1744). It pays particular devotion to the Shintō sun goddess Amaterasu and to the uji-gami, or Shintō tutelary deities, but also uses in its popular ethics the teachings of Zen Buddhism and...

...by the common people; furthermore, Watarai Nobuyoshi, Anzai, and others decoupled Shintō from its previous amalgamation with medieval Buddhism, explaining it from a Confucian perspective. Ishida Baigan developed a religious tradition called Shingaku (“Heart Learning”), which articulated a “way” for townsmen and farmers. An amalgamation of ideas from the three...